


Wear No Armor

by Thurisaz



Category: X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-24
Updated: 2012-08-24
Packaged: 2017-11-12 18:51:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,402
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/494509
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Thurisaz/pseuds/Thurisaz
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“It looks like shit,” said Alex.  He looked up at the model hanging in as a sentinel in the hangar.  He picked up files, folders, paperweights, pens, and tried to hit the model down from its suspension.  “Bet you ten bucks it can’t even get off the ground.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Wear No Armor

_Luxury flight: an entirely new commodity. And the armed forces agreed. By sheer luck there had been an XB-70 within the hold of the CIA, and one Henry McCoy was able to get his mind wrapped around it._

_The Blackbird, ever the figurehead in aesthetic and pragmatic aviary technology, sat in a hangar at a ‘Secure Location’, and gathered dust. "You don't--do you see?" said Henry McCoy to his handlers. "It has vertical propulsion, and then you can increase the volume of the cabin for drops even. This changes everything. I could--I could be featured at the Stark Expo. "_

_"That's great, McCoy, but what the CIA is looking at right now is maybe a more efficient helicopter. There's your vertical propulsion." His handler was a broad-faced man who spoke more through his nose than his mouth._

_"I'm telling you Saunders, fixed-wing flight needs to be focused on--we need this advancement. "_

_(In hindsight, many many years later, Henry McCoy would come across the V-22 Osprey and would be bitter until the day he died.)_

_The Stark Expo was never an option after that, but Charles and Erik and even gangly little Sean heard whispers about a plane and saw the model and the turbines and the landing gear shoved into Hank’s garage-turned-lab. He gutted the Valkyrie, resentful as he did it, and made it anew. Henry McCoy, god of aviation, giving this new baby an entirely new soul._

_“It looks like shit,” said Alex. He looked up at the model hanging in as a sentinel in the hangar. He picked up files, folders, paperweights, pens, and tried to hit the model down from its suspension. “Bet you ten bucks it can’t even get off the ground.”_

*  
Sometimes, in the dark places of the mansion or the hangar, Alex tries to get them caught. He’ll push up against Hank’s chest to try and get him into the light of a corner or the threshold of a doorway. Shadows are especially dark in the winter, and in the summer and spring, when they’re not chasing or being chased across the globe, the hangar or the belly of the Blackbird act as trysting trees.

Tonight Alex reaches up and rubs the backs of Hank’s new ears, smoothing the points between his fingers. 

“You do that a lot,” says Hank. He rubs his face on Alex’s cheeks, his hair.

“I’m a physical guy, what can I say?”

“So I can see.” 

Hank’s eyes are yellow and slit, but they shine like new pennies when they catch the light dusting through the ajar door. He sniffs at Alex’s neck, moves his mouth over Alex’s ear. When Alex reaches up and massages his scalp he beings to purr.

“You big baby.” But Alex kisses him anyway, still trying to push him out the door. “Do you feel that?”

Hank pricks his ears but says nothing.

“It’s a rush. It’s being so close—“ to the door, to each other, to the sun rising the next day. “Gets the blood going, y’know?”

Alex grabs his face and it feels like the first time he went Mach 2 in the old XB-70 Valkyrie. His heart had been smaller then, and his skin paler, thinner, but the rush of adrenaline whipped through him like charged copper wire. His lungs had clenched, it seemed, as the sound barrier broke around the nose of the Valkyrie. His handler, Saunders, threw up in the sitting bay. Hank laughed for the rest of the flight—the rest of the day.

“Easy there, Bambi. Cool your jets.” His claws are in Alex’s jacket, his face pressed into Alex’s throat. 

With feet and hands he grabs onto Alex’s body. “Don’t call me that.”

Alex just laughs into his face, leaning against the doorframe (so close). “You’re shit outta luck, babe,” he says. “You gave me this choice, and I’m sure as hell not letting go of it.”

Hank blinks and Alex pushes him into the hallway.

*

_They stood in a line within the hangar, looking into the black nose of the only plane left on the base. Under the fluorescent light it shone like jet and smelled like tarmac and spilled oil._

_Stepping from the light (how dramatic) came Hank. Blue, yellowed, furred, and towering like a redwood. Alex brought his hands down to his sides, uncrossing his arms and blinking too quickly._

_“You’re perfect, Hank,” said Raven. Face to face, blue to blue, Raven stared at herself. Vanity. Like a mother to her child._

_“You sure you can fly this?”_

_“Of course I can,” said Hank, said Beast. “I designed it.”_

*

“I want to see you,” one of them whispers under a table in the lab. Neither of them move. They don’t have sex. Never have, maybe never will. 

* 

_Just like in every worst-case scenario they fell out of the sky, dragged down by the Caspartina. The crash resounded as they plane rolled over the Cuban beach. Somehow the black paint and heat-resistant resin on the Blackbird stayed in one place, not once peeling off like the steel panels of the Caspartina’s sides._

_It was Alex who called out as they tumbled. “Jesus fucking Christ—” The nose of the Blackbird caved in, the glass completely destroyed, and the cockpit empty. “Shit,” he said. “Shit shit shit shit.” The harness held and choked him back, pinning him upside down and canted sideways from the roll of the bay._

_Like the tide Hank came up and broke the seat from the belly of the jet. The hard plastic of the seat and the metal of the belts smoked and burned at his touch, heated to almost melting. Alex launched himself out of the seat, through the burst sides of the jet, and into the sand. Where he stepped the beach became glass and the broken palm frawns caught like tinder. His own sweat boiled off of his skin, moisture from the crash of the ocean water from the Caspartina’s sides evaporated into mist, leaving salt all over Alex’s skin._

_He turned, ropes of liquid glass spinning off of his boots, to face the gutted jet. “I’m going to fucking kill you.”_

_Hank blinked._

_“And then I’m going to die, I’m going to die because of this fucking plane.”_

*  
Outside the hangar—a hasty addition between the mansion and the woods—Alex sits in the grass, smoking. “You better make this good, Bambi,” he says. “This is my last rolling paper.”

“Those’ll kill you, you know.” Hank is doing crunches, hanging on by his feet (or are they hands?) to the wing of the new SR-71. 

Alex snorts. “Yeah, and so will doing three hundred of those.”

“These,” says Hank, punctuating with a roll of his abdominal muscles, “won’t clog my lungs or cut my life by twenty years.”

“Maybe I don’t want to live those last twenty.” Alex smokes the cigarette down until his fingers are clutching ash, and wipes his hands on the grass. 

“Doesn’t that hurt?” Alex shakes his head (of course it wouldn’t, this is a Summers we’re talking about). “Also that won’t hide the smell. At all.” Hank’s nostrils flare and close, and he shakes his head. “That’s gross,” he growls.

“Yeah, well, you’re gross. I mean look at you.” Alex sticks his tongue out.

In a fit of embarrassment Hank closes his mouth, tries not to pant. “Fuck you.”

“Go ahead.” They match glares before Alex cocks a smile. 

So Hank leads them over to the gangway of the Blackbird and licks at Alex’s face. He opens the hatch with one arm and chuffs. Step by step he purrs into Alex’s neck, his shoulder, his hands, but the moment he steps back onto the aluminum flooring of the cockpit Alex stops.

Hank ticks his head to the left, blinks once, and Alex punches him square in the nose. His glasses break (and probably his nose, due to the blood). Like fire Alex recoils, whips his hands out of Hank’s grasp, and rubs at his face.

“Alex? Are you—“

“Shut up,” he snaps. “Just shut the fuck up. And get out.”

For once, instead of growling back like he’s gotten used to under the constant pressure of Charles’ melancholy and Sean’s indifference, he stays quiet. Hank crouches over, picks up his broken glasses, and leaves.

Before he shuts the hangar he smells Alex burn the jet.

*

_As they left the beach Alex elected to destroy the evidence of their jet, melting it and slicing it to incomprehensible shreds while Charles bled out. “I’m so sorry, Hank. I’m so sorry.” Charles was, but Alex was not._

_Rebuilding was easy. SR-71s were new and in high demand as a military product, and so procuring one through Charles proved no task. They—the X-Men now—wedged it into the woods behind the mansion. Again Hank gutted the jet, tossing the parts into his lab and the back lawn and the spare dining rooms._

_“This time I’m going to up safety—add sonar, reinstall vertical propulsion. Three, maybe four more J58s if I can get someone to look through engine supply.” Charles watched him from the paved balcony. “It’s going to work this time. And it’ll be more than Mach-3. It’s going to be better.”_

*  
A week crawls over the house like molasses. Charles focuses on Sean this time around, coaching him from the ground. He’s so pale in the sunlight that sometimes it hurts Hank’s eyes to look for him across the acres and acres of trimmed lawn.

He walks down the first floor corridor, past rooms filled with lamps and furniture and old clothes and used toothbrushes. One of them smells like pepper and candle wax; the next like soap and perfumed paper. Most of them smell like dust.

Hank turns into the kitchen, and finds Alex perched on the counter, feet up against the refrigerator. When Alex sees him he jumps down, heavy on his feet. “Upstairs,” he says, and walks out.

Alex’s room is neat, sparse, mostly red and grey like the other suites in the mansion. It’s cold, though, and there are quilts on all of the furniture (that’s what happens with no central heating). Alex toes off his shoes and sits on his bed. Hank sits across from him (because even though they don’t like each other, they still care about each other), and then Alex begins: 

"My father was an aviator--a pilot, I guess. I mean, he flew commercial, but we also had this little airplane with some French name, and it could hold four of us. Scott didn't like to fly, and mom said Gabriel was too little, so really it could only hold three of us. 

"We would go on these trips--they're blurry but I can remember the blue, or my dad fixing my headset. He let me fly once, you know, the whole plane. He let go of everything, just put his hands on his lap, looked at me and said, 'Here ya go kiddo.'

"I don't remember if it was Honolulu or Anchorage. Sand and snow look the same whenever I try to remember them at all. I can't feel it, not the way I used to. Haley said I was a special kid for not remembering stuff like that. 

"But anyway, my dad, my mom, we would fly all the time. Sometimes Scott would come. Gabe never came along--we always needed a sitter over the weekends. He learned that whenever we said 'fly' or 'trip' he should cry and scream and throw shit at my head. I still can't understand why. Mom and dad and that old war plane was the best."

Hank traces his fingers along the heavy quilts Alex tells his story. Alex stops, looking out the window, looking around the house. "He can't know," says Hank. "He can't know if he doesn't try. You know how he is, otherwise this--the School--wouldn't have happened. There wouldn't be a reason."

"Right, yeah, okay,” says Alex. He scratches the top of Hank’s hand, pulls on the fur there. “I can't remember where we were going, or why we left. Something happened. Of course something happened--but this was, you know, it. It was like going to sleep with a fever and then having a fever dream. I didn't hurt much, but that's because of--I don't know. I can't remember. 

"My dad, the pilot, went through the window. "

"Killed on impact?" Hank, always right, ever the doctor. 

"No. You should know better," says Alex. "There's never 'on impact'. All that means is the fucking doctor didn't know how long it took for my dad."

Hank looks down, a few blue hairs falling onto the quilt and red ottoman. "I'm . . . I'm sorry."

"Great,” says Alex. “That fixes everything."

“Scott and Gabe have been dead for a few years now. At least I think they are. There’s really no other option for them, by now. My dad went through a sheet of fucking pressurized plastic. Glass at least—glass at least shatters. And I don’t want to fucking know what happened to my mom. 

“If you say you’re fucking sorry, Bambi, I’m going to burn you until there’s nothing left. Not even blue fucking ashes. Do you hear me?”

The quilt bunches under Hanks hands and feet. “Yes. Of course. Fair enough.”

They tuck themselves into the corner of that room, the one with the ugly wallpaper and ornamental rugs. The fireplace is cold and slightly damp, and so Hank, watching Alex curl into himself and shake, moves closer. Blue fur sticks to the upholstery and most of Alex’s clothing (again).

There is a bruise on Alex’s wrist. He rubs it, holds it close like an old secret. “I wanted to let go so badly. I would rather drown than be like that.”

“Sean wouldn’t have dropped you, you know.”

“That doesn’t mean I felt better about being there.”

“There were worse things to think about. Like nuclear apocalypse, or something.”

“Hah,” Alex buts him in the head. “Or something.”

In the dark of the corner of Alex’s bedroom Hank moves forward, smells along Alex’s mouth and ears and eyes. Once or twice he nips his face and purrs deep in his chest, right over his heart.

“You’re such a baby,” whispers Alex. His eyes are closed and his fingers are holding onto Hank’s mane like a buoy, a lover, a lifeline.


End file.
